It's Just a Mascot...Or So I Thought
Dec. 18, 2025 By Ryan Nausieda I’m a communication systems specialist on our Marketing and Communications team, and I also teach communication here as an adjunct instructor. For years, I sat in meetings where someone would float the idea of a mascot, and it never made it past the talking stage. We’d nod, park it for “later” and move on. Someone would make a note. It would disappear into wherever meeting notes go. In my mind, mascot talk lived in the “light branding” category, a fun task wedged between other urgent work. Pick a character. Pick some colors. Make sure it looks good on a T-shirt and the website. Done. On to something serious. This year has felt different. We’re about to launch a new mascot for our campus, and I’ve watched the process unfold up close. It has mattered more than I expected. A small group of colleagues has poured time and creativity into this launch. My part has mostly been at the edges, lukewarm coffee in hand in a room full of windows, listening and tossing out ideas when they might actually help instead of talking just to fill the air. Somewhere in the middle of those meetings, it clicked that this wasn’t just a design project. It was a conversation about belonging. In one meeting, someone said, half joking and half serious, “Whatever we choose, our students cannot immediately roast it.” Everyone laughed, then the room went quiet. Underneath the joke was a real question: Will our students see themselves in this, or will it come across as a thing that isn’t really for them? Instinctively, I went back to the research. Work by scholars like Vincent Tinto and Terrell Strayhorn (and all the articles that land in your inbox between classes and meetings) keeps circling back to the same idea: students stay when they feel rooted somewhere. Not just passing through with the car still running outside. Not just on the roster, but part of a community that would notice if they were gone. I think about a student who came to class every week in a fast-food uniform, clearly coming straight from work. Same shirt. Same name tag. Same seat near the back of the classroom. She told me she parked in the same spot every time because she was afraid of getting lost in the ramps and being late. One day she walked in wearing a GRCC hoodie over that uniform. She shrugged it off. “They had a sale in the bookstore,” she said, but the moment stuck with me. I remember thinking, “She sees herself here.” Strayhorn talks about belonging as a basic human need, not a bonus feature. That idea reframed a lot of things I used to quietly file under “nice if we ever get to it.” It made me rethink what counts as real work, the kind that helps people keep showing up. After that settled in, mascot conversations didn’t seem silly anymore. I still appreciated the light moments, but my question shifted from “Is this important?” to “What could this mean for our students?” I paid closer attention. Most people don’t look back and say, “My college was the institution whose brand standards included a hawk.” They say, “We were the Hawks,” or the Panthers, or the Owls. That word “we” does a lot of work. It turns a logo into shorthand for late nights, nervous first days and the people who got them through. That’s especially true at a place like GRCC. Our students commute. Many are working nights, raising kids, changing careers or coming back after a hard start somewhere else. Their time on campus can be quick, in and out between everything else they are juggling. That’s a lot to carry. Research on community colleges backs up what we already see: relationships and a sense of “I belong here” are some of the strongest reasons students keep going. The more a place acts like a real “we,” the better the chances students will keep choosing us. A mascot will not fix food insecurity, child care or transportation, and it won’t make anyone’s life simple or guarantee a smooth semester. But it can give people a shared space to step into instead of just walking past, another way to say “we” about a place that might only hold a short, intense chapter of their lives. Because of that, the questions that matter most to me aren’t about campaigns or clicks. Those still matter in my world, but I find myself thinking about other things: Does this character seem open to everyone who walks through our doors, not just the loudest voices? Could a nervous student at orientation see it and sense even a small shift toward, “Maybe there’s a place for me here”? What actually creates belonging at GRCC is going to happen in relationships: in classrooms, advising meetings, financial aid offices, front desks and those quick hallway check-ins where someone either gets seen or disappears into the background. It isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t come with a launch date or a photo shoot. When you ask students what made the difference, they tell you about a person, not a program. The symbols matter more than I used to admit, partly because they travel with people when we don’t. They show up on sweatshirts and flyers, in graduation photos with crooked tassels, on hoodies someone pulls on to shovel the driveway. They show up in the stories people tell: “That was my school. We were the ______.” All of that makes the mascot something meant to serve the people who do the work here every day: the ones teaching, advising, fixing systems, cleaning classrooms and greeting students who aren’t sure where to go. It is something they can lean on as they help people stay. So when I’m in a room where people are talking about ears, eyes, colors and names, I try to remember what is at the core of it. We’re not just picking a character. We’re deciding what kind of “we” we are inviting people into, and who will be included in that “we.” If this new mascot helps even a few more students feel a little less alone here, or helps someone years from now remember and say, “I was part of that, and it mattered,” then this will not have been a small project at all. It becomes a quiet way of saying, “You belong with us while you are here and, in some small way, even after you go.”